Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

I have written about my frustrations with service before, but I wanted to share three more items. For those of you who have not seen today's (January 9th, 2011) “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip, it mirrors some of my frustration with service groups. This was the first item I wanted to share. The second item was with my Internet service. For many years I had two different land-based telephone lines coming into my house. One of them was a “residential” account, and one of them was a “business” account. Having worked for the telephone company in my younger days, I even understood the rationale between having two different types of accounts, and charges, for...

Over the New Year's weekend a news story started to unfold. It was about the Apple iPhone and how the standard clock application would not sound its alarm when set. The story became (said a radio announcer) the number two story of the day. All day long I heard about the iPhone's clock not working, and it was also reported that Apple was not going to fix it, since it was deemed as being a “temporary” problem and that things would be back to normal by January 4th “or so”....no one seemed to be sure why it occurred or exactly when things would go back to normal.Late on the evening of January 3rd I sent out a Tweet that said:> iPhone users: I know my Android phone will wake me. Can...

The last day of the year is here. At an hour when a lot of people are out partying and “ringing in the New Year” I am sitting here with a glass of wine and taking a bit of quiet time to reflect on what happened last year and what might happen next year. If you are reading this hoping to learn something about FOSS or Free Software, and will be disappointed if you do not learn to grep or pipe from this blog entry, perhaps you should stop reading now. Some things are certain, the sages tell us, like death and taxes. Certainly there have been a lot of both this year, and there will be plenty of both next year. On the death scene, one of my former Boy Scout leaders died...

I was at a Linux Meetup a couple of months ago and I ran into another former employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (“They are everywhere, everywhere!”) named Larry Camilli. We started talking and somehow the conversation came around to a program called “AXE” (vaX Archictecture Exerciser). Larry looked at me with a strange look on his face and said “That was my program! That is what I did for Digital!” Larry went on to say that few people he met, even those who worked for Digital, knew about the AXE (or its equivalent for the MicroVAX, the “MAX”) program. I replied that I worked in an operating system group, so we often delt with new CPUs, and we knew the *AXE...

It is late, very late, and you are still trying to decide on a gift for your [ mother | father | sister | brother | uncle | aunt | grand* | step* ] You would have had enough money for a gift, but you saw those really awesome headphones that you just had to buy, and now you are very low on money. And it is late....very late.... Why not give the gift that keeps on giving? The gift that most of these people will really appreciate, and that demonstrates the true meaning of the holiday season? The gift of your time. Find a nice holiday picture on the Internet (make sure it is freely licensed, perhaps by Creative Commons) and use GIMP, Inkscape or some other freely...

Every once in a while something happens that makes me fairly proud of what I do. Whatever I actually do I am often not quite sure at the time and usually find out about it much later. I am proud that a few words of mine helped to start an open source development center in Soweto, Africa (one year later I found out about this), and I am proud that a talk I gave in 1999 inspired Mark Spencer to make Asterisk a FOSS project (discovered this in 2001). I am proud that I helped get Linus an Alpha processor and encouraged him to make Linux a 64-bit operating system (three-year payback on this one), and I am proud of the many students and FOSS developers and advocates that I have...

For the past couple of years I have been orchestrating a contest at Campus Party events in Spain, Brazil and Colombia which challenges a participant to make a video using only free software. This means that the participants have to create the video, edit the video, make the credits and produce a CD using only free software tools, and the entire presentation has to be licensed under a Creative Commons license. The participants are given a list of possible software to use ahead of time, but they can use any software they want to use as long as it is either Free Software or Open Source. They do not know what the subject of the video will be until the first day of Campus Party,...